Archives for June 2004

The one aspect of the daily grind that is guaranteed to provoke an opinion is the commute to work. Congested roads, overcrowded trains, packed buses and sweaty tubes – it’s been said that if travel broadens the mind, commuting shrinks it back.

According to a recent report by the Rail Passengers Council, we are in ‘despair’, as one in four of London’s commuter trains fails to arrive on time. Trade unions criticise bosses for stressing out their employees by expecting them to commute too much. Some go further, linking what might otherwise be regarded as a relatively innocuous activity with high blood pressure, heart disease and blood clots in the leg.

Few would contest that the UK’s transport infrastructure is in a sorry state. But if the commuting experience is really so bad, why do so many of us continue to do it? This was the topic of discussion at the recent debate organised by the London-based Transport Research Group. (1)

David Young, project coordinator at Sustrans South-East, was keen to trumpet the virtues of cycling in the fight against obesity. This proved topical given the publication, the following week, of the House of Commons Health Committee report on the issue, with strategies to reduce people’s reliance on transport featuring prominently in its recommendations.

Continuing the theme of millennial moral panics, Nicky Gavron, deputy mayor of London, highlighted the issue of congestion. If we all worked from home, she suggested, there would be 20 per cent less traffic on the roads. However, co-panellist Timandra Harkness longed ‘for the two separate worlds’ of home and work that she has otherwise denied herself as a freelance journalist. As Gavron acknowledged, for many of us the daily commute is the price we are willing to pay for the dynamism of city life.

The ideal of mass mobility and the more familiar reality of congested commuting are arguably the essence of bustling cities. A member of the audience argued that we might even welcome the opportunity for quiet reflection that stalling commuter routes offer up, if admittedly by default. The RAC Foundation has discovered, to its evident horror, that even if our journeys were to double in duration ‘we’d just shrug and leave more time’ (2). So why has the act of getting to work become such a major cause for concern now, despite our reluctance to avoid commuting in practice?

Commuting today is an experience we share in common, not restricted to the ‘pinstripe suits’ of old. In his quirky The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes how we take our troubled selves with us when we travel. This, I think, can only be intensified in the routine journeying of the jaded commuter. As well as ourselves though, we carry around with us the broader anxieties and frustrations of our times.

So it is striking how the discussion of the (im-) mobile metropolis tends to focus on the despairing angst-ridden commuter as much as infrastructural failure. The debate about commuting tends to become a metaphor for concerns that our working lives lack definition; and the sense that the commuter routes are falling apart as well only reinforces this sense of disengagement and confusion.

Consequently, as Austin Williams, chairing the debate, said, ‘transport is rarely discussed in its own terms’. For Tony Grayling, associate director (Sustainability) at the Institute for Public Policy Research, it is no longer about ‘trains, planes and automobiles’. Far from being a practical issue that needs addressing, transport has become an area through which a whole range of moral and political prejudices are aired.

The policy response, in this context, makes more sense. Grayling went on to explain how he was interested in minimising the environmental and social costs of travel, and what he described as the undermining of ‘communities of place’. The deputy mayor was unapologetically intent on ‘reducing the need to travel’ altogether in the name of creating her ‘liveable city’. It seems that what might once have been regarded as a parochial, even eccentric contribution to the policy discussion has come to dominate both the transport agenda and the curiously pedestrian thinking on all things urban.

Indeed such tangential considerations as those posed by Grayling, Gavron and Young alike, are celebrated for their very joined-up-ness. Instead of dreaming up better ways of getting us from A to B, politicians and policy makers alike are increasingly concerned with engineering their particular take on society. Addressing everything from the environment, public health, and social inequality, to the work-life balance, community-building and civic engagement – it’s hardly surprising we’ve come to a stand-still.

We will live in a ‘carbon-literate’ society, where carbon is a parallel currency and carbon credits tradable on ‘cBay’. We will exist within the confines of carbon budgeting, subjecting ourselves to a regime analogous to our present day penchant for calorie counting with weekly visits to Carbon Watchers. Our internal climates, that is, central heating and air conditioning, will be considered so much ‘thermal monotony’.

There will be no supermarkets as they will be deemed extravagances totting up the food miles of those foolhardy enough to desire the energy-guzzling exotic and convenience foods to which we had formerly been accustomed. Indeed, there will be a return to the larder. And if this all gets too much to bare, there are always the eco-helplines helpfully listed at the back of the book. This is a world in which the winners are domestic tourism and bicycle repair shops. This is the future according to Mayer Hillman.

Under headings such as ‘What should scare you most’ or ‘these figures should shock you’ the author berates us for our energy-profligacy. Rising expectations, he makes the equation, inevitably mean continued climate change. It’s as simple as that. We must divorce resource use from illusory notions of wellbeing without delay, if we are not to succumb to the threat posed by what he describes as the single biggest problem facing humanity. But the fiscal route advocated by many of those sympathetic to his cause lacks the ‘moral basis’ or ‘psychological resonance’, he says, to usher in a new Blitz spirit, and the kind of sacrifices we must inevitably endure. The energy embodied in manufacture, transport and retail must come to be seen as a social ill, rather than a by-product of the relentless motion of the wheels of progress, as might once have been the case. We must narrow our ‘spread-out lifestyles’ if we are to effect the necessary change to avert imminent disaster on a global scale.

Hillman tells the reader that Asia’s consumption has tripled since 1970. The developing world’s one third share of the global shop in 1990 is predicted to rise to two thirds by 2050. And China’s growth, standing at an annual rate on average of 8% since 1980, will result in its economy growing four times over within just two decades. Reason to celebrate perhaps? Except this will not herald the kind of world that the author deems equitable; at least, it offends against his tenets of thrifty internationalism and intergenerational leveling. The common-held belief that the generations to follow might expect to be better off than those that preceded them is anathema to all he holds dear. Instead Hillman claims to seek historical redress for a developing world that is both ‘least responsible’ for a world ravaged by climate change, and ‘most vulnerable’ to what this holds for the future.

Surely, you might argue, in a world committed to development, those nations so compromised might be better equipped to cope with, even influence, their fates. But that is to underestimate Hillman’s profound pessimism. He is blind to the past gains and dismissive of the future claims for ‘human ingenuity’. Fortunately, however, for those more optimistic and with an ear to historical precedent, the case against the author – as the figures he himself presents attest – tell a very different story.

The UK, given its now reluctant status as the first offender on the industrial roll call, has contributed 15% of global emissions since 1750. However, in its regrettably sluggish current period, between 1990 and 2000 the UK economy grew by 26%, with energy demand increasing by just 8%. Government too has recently played its part, with the cumulative impact of strict building regulations ensuring that new housing uses up just 60% of the heating energy typical of the existing stock. And, by 2008, new cars are expected to emit a quarter less carbon dioxide than they did in 1995 thanks to a voluntary agreement between manufacturers and the EU.

Other interventions – distorted by the eco-friendly orthodoxy adopted by officialdom, (despite Hillman’s radical pretensions and protestations to the contrary) – have been less welcome. Methane emitted from landfill sites, as the author acknowledges, has been the most fruitful of renewable energy sources to date. This will, nonetheless, be curtailed, consistent with the rationale of EU legislation aimed at reducing organic waste. The decommissioning of nuclear power stations – taken as a given by Hillman, who rejects the notion that they are a good contender for the solving the problem – goes unchallenged despite the author recognizing that they would otherwise have a future of at least 250 years from known reserves of uranium.

The coincidence of the decline of the UK economy – with the consequent rise of transport and domestic use to the top of the energy charts, meaning that today 51% of energy-use is by individuals – and the apocalyptic individualising of the environmental problem – are instructive. As Hillman freely admits, what divides him and his detractors is not the science so much as attitudes to risk and uncertainty. He prefers to dismiss both his critics, and the reader reluctant to follow his lifestyle tips, as guilty of ‘repression, suppression, denial, projection and dissociation’. Overconsumption is the problem and obesity the appropriate metaphor, we are told, for our decadent times. Rational debate and contestation don’t get a look-in. This can only delay things.

So far, says Hillman, all we’ve done is ‘muddle through’. If that’s the case, then we’d be well advised to continue doing just that.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.